video
Doctor Mike on improving trust in public health
Jeff Pinette for STAT
As anyone who attended the STAT Summit last week heard, YouTuber Doctor Mike had some spicy takes on content produced by medical authorities like the AMA. Today, STAT's Alex Hogan — who spoke with Mike Varshavski on stage — has a new video out with more of the physician and content creator's perspective on how medicine can build a better social media strategy.
Varshavski started his channel in 2017 because he felt there was "a lack of evidence-based voices online," he said. "It created this gap that was filled by grifters, by snake oil people, people who were selling all sorts of miracle cures. And we weren't there to combat that."
Watch the latest video in Alex's STATus Report series. And if you get to the very end, you may catch a brief glimpse into STAT's second annual karaoke night …
science
After initial excitement, research says this long Covid treatment doesn't work
In early 2021, STAT's Matt Herper wrote about the excitement surrounding a drug commonly used to treat gout that could potentially reduce the risk for hospitalization from Covid-19. But experts cautioned that the data was too limited to draw conclusions. Within about a year, data confirmed that the drug, colchicine, was not, in fact, protective for patients with acute Covid-19 infections. Yesterday, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found similarly underwhelming results for the same drug when used to treat the symptoms of long Covid.
Despite the mechanisms that made it a "biologically plausible" candidate, the study found that participants who took the drug didn't have better functional capacity or respiratory function than those in the placebo group. Their inflammatory markers and symptoms like depression, fatigue, or shortness of breath were also comparable.
(For more context on the drug: The FDA approved colchicine in 2023 as an anti-inflammatory for heart disease, but physician uptake has been slow. Meanwhile, the same drug has been impossible to access for people with chronic illnesses like familial Mediterranean fever in Gaza, as a Palestinian writer explained in a First Opinion essay last month.)
first opinion
How to talk about uncertainty
When it comes to Covid, there's one discussion that never seems to get less heated: where did the virus come from? In a new First Opinion essay, two Harvard public health professors emphasize that there are important lessons to be learned from "the short but dramatic history" of the Covid origin question.
"We think students (and maybe all of us) benefit from exposure to the arguments of those who believe passionately that they know something, even as passionate advocates reach very different, often irreconcilable conclusions — and even if they are partisan," the authors write. Read more about how and why they're teaching today's public health students about this contentious debate.
what's the word
Clues that RFK Jr. and others might hate
Don't tell health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about this one: "colorful food additives." And back in 2020, plenty of folks took issue with this one: "Masks and globes for safety, for short." Complete this week's mini crossword.
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